How to Create a Sales Sequence That Doesn't Annoy Prospects

Updated 10/4/24

Every interaction you have with a prospect can either bring you closer to a deal or push them away. Frequent outreach can make them feel bombarded, and impersonal outreach can cause frustration. The goal is to engage them, and to do that, you need to take a close look at your process and apply best practices for optimizing the sales sequence.

A sales sequence, also referred to as a sales cadence, is a series of steps or interactions implemented with the expectation of guiding prospects from initial contact to a closed deal. This includes strategies like email sequencing and other touchpoints like phone calls and social media interactions. Each interaction in a sales sequence is intended to move the prospect further along in the buyer journey without overwhelming them. 

The difference between a closed deal and a missed opportunity with a qualified prospect can come down to how smoothly your sales sequence flows. Luckily, implementing a few sales sequence best practices can help you create an effective process for turning prospects into buyers.

These seven steps will help you create a sales sequence that is well-timed, relevant, personalized, and won’t annoy your prospects. This will all work toward improving your chances of conversion while keeping your customers happy.

• • Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile & Buyer Personas
  • Step 2: Map Out Your Sales Process
  • Step 3: Identify Key Touchpoints
  • Step 4: Create a Multi-Touchpoint/Channel Sequence
  • Step 5: Personalize Your Messages
  • Step 6: Test, Measure, and Optimize
  • Step 7: Implement Automation and AI

7 Steps to Create a Sales Sequence That Doesn’t Annoy Prospects

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile & Buyer Personas

Creating a successful sales sequence starts with understanding who you’re targeting. This will include building out your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas. Your ICP sets the foundation for every sales sequence best practice, playing a role in developing each step in your sales process. It outlines the key characteristics of the customer that would benefit most from your product or service.

Here’s how you can set the groundwork for ensuring that your outreach is relevant and targeted toward the prospects that are most likely to convert.

Specify Your Target Prospect 

When identifying your key prospect, remember that you may need more than one customer profile. This is dependent on the complexity of your project.

Whether you’re working with one or multiple customer profiles targeting different segments of your target audience, you’ll need to cover all the bases. This encompasses firmographics as well as demographic and geographic information.

Demographics include characteristics of an individual like age, occupation, and education. Geographic information focuses on using physical locations to divide target prospects and understand how their location influences buying behaviors. Firmographics take your ICP a step further in ensuring that your outreach resonates with your prospect by identifying the unique challenges of their business. The firmographic information you should collect for your target profile includes: 

• • Industry
  • Company size
  • Revenue
  • Location
  • Number of employees
  • Ownership style
  • Market trends

Research Your Prospect 

Thorough research is key to prospecting in sales. A structured approach to researching your prospects will help keep you focused on the key information you need to understand your prospects on a deeper level. This includes their familiarity with your product, their business needs, and what additional information they may need to fully convert. 

Methods for prospect research include:

• • Surveys: Gather firsthand insights from your target prospects to understand their pains and needs using direct surveys.
  • Market Research: Identify trends in the market and common challenges faced by your target prospects through industry reports and market studies.
  • Social Media Mining: Collect valuable information on the decision-makers at your target companies using platforms like LinkedIn and company social media pages.
  • Company Website Review: Build your understanding of the companies and prospects you’re targeting by becoming familiar with their website and the information provided on their public pages.

Ask Informative Questions

Now that you’ve identified your target prospect, outlined key characteristics, and researched their business and market, you can start asking some deeper questions. 

A sales sequence best practice is to prepare a list of questions that will define your ideal customer profile further. These answers will guide the structuring of your interactions to help you have more valuable engagements with your prospects. Some suggestions for questions to include are: 

• • “What are challenges you’re currently facing in [area relevant to your product/service]?”
  • “How do you handle [specific issue] now?”
  • “Are you using any existing solutions? If so, how happy are you with the results you’ve seen?”
  • “Are you familiar with our product/service? If so, how much has the product/service impacted your processes? If not, how do you see it impacting your processes?

The answers to the questions can be used to help you position yourself as a solution early on. If a prospect is already using a competing product, digging into why they chose that product/service over you can help expose gaps that you may be able to fill. If they don’t have a way to address their current challenge, you can begin to position yourself as the solution. 

Related Content: Buyer Personas Worksheet

Step 2: Map Out Your Sales Process

The focus for creating an effective sales sequence shouldn’t just be on closing the deal. Part of creating that sequence is mapping out clear and consistent steps for guiding your prospect through each stage of the buyer journey. This is the sales process – the movement from discovery or early stages of awareness to a closed deal. Even the best closing techniques rely on a structured sales process. Buyer expectations for a modern sales process are high. If you’re not delivering at every step, you may lose them before you make it to the closing stage.

Mapping out your sales process helps you identify any inefficiencies that may be slowing you down. You can even expose what’s working the best to streamline your journey and increase your chance of conversion. Here are some sales sequence best practices you’ll want to keep in mind to map out your sales process effectively:

1. 1. Start With Your End Goal: Are you aiming to secure a meeting, provide a demo, or close the sale? Working backward from your destination will help you determine what your sales team needs at each step to bring them closer to the objective. Every touchpoint should be created with the end goal in mind.
   2. Incorporate Cross-Functional Teams: IT, product, marketing, and customer service teams will all be involved in the success of your sales process. Collaboration and shared goals will maximize your effectiveness at every stage from initial outreach to close. 
   3. Outline The Sales Steps: Break down all the steps of your sales process and the actions needed to accomplish each step. Whether it’s sending an intro email, executing a discovery call, or following up after a demo, make sure each step has a clearly defined purpose that moves you toward a closed deal.
   4. Map Out the Buyer’s Journey: Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. What would they want out of the buyer journey? What kind of experience do they need to have to want to do a deal with you? Understand their perspective and then build customized journeys that speak to them and their needs. 
   5. Test, Test, TEST For Better Optimization: Never stop optimizing. Test out changes to your process and use the results to consistently optimize your process for speed and effectiveness.

Related Content: Buyer Journey Customization: Three Things Buyers Want from Modern Sales Processes

Step 3: Identify Key Touchpoints

A key component for mapping out your sales process will be your touchpoints. These moments in your sales sequence will be where your prospects make decisions that move the deal forward or create stalls. Your focus should be on outcomes over volume metrics. They’re opportunities to build trust, showcase your product/service as a solution, and overcome objections. 

Too many touchpoints are likely to frustrate your prospects, so as you create your sales sequence, make sure to identify the most impactful ones. 

• • Initial Outreach: The starting point of your sales sequence is the initial outreach via email or phone call. A clear and concise subject line and a compelling and relevant reason for reaching out to them will help provide immediate value. The goal of this touchpoint is to pique their interest, so relevancy is especially important here. Use your ICP to tap into their pain points and offer an actionable solution with your product/service.
  • Follow-Up: It’s not uncommon for your initial outreach to go unanswered, even when implementing some outreach best practices. This is where your follow-up emails and calls come in. Focus on how you’re communicating the value of your product/service. The goal of your follow-up message is to gauge their interest. Don’t forget to include a call to action that is personalized for where they are in their journey. Many people struggle with the frequency of follow-ups. Start by spacing your follow-ups a few days apart. This way you can stay top of mind without making them feel bombarded.
  • Demo: A major touchpoint for your sales sequence will be your demo. If all goes well with your initial interactions and you offer a demo and/or product trial, this step will be crucial. Hands-on experience with your product will offer your prospect first-hand insight into how your product directly addresses their pain points. Be sure to structure your demo in a way that focuses on the most relevant features for their needs.
  • Final Proposal: The speed at which your customers progress through your sales sequence depends on several factors. This includes their general interest, their education levels, budget, and the needs they need filled. Based on the feedback you receive from your other touchpoints, you can determine when they are ready for a final proposal. This touchpoint is likely where you’ll face last-minute objections about factors like cost or timing of implementation. Come prepared to address these common objections with evidence of your product’s success and other supporting materials.

Email Sequencing As Part Of Your Sales Sequence

How to decide the best route for email sequencing is often a question that comes to mind when evaluating the touchpoints in your sales sequence. How many emails should I send? How often should I send them? How can I keep them relevant?

Sales sequence best practices include developing base-level email sequencing as a foundation for your outreach efforts. There are a few guidelines to keep in mind when building out that foundation. 

• • Intro Email: Keep it clear and concise. Relevancy is key. Focus on addressing their specific business needs.
  • Follow-Up Email 1: If you don’t receive a response to your initial email, use your follow-up email to offer additional value. For example, including relevant insights from an industry report can support the value of your product and give you a reason for following up without sounding pushy. 
  • Follow-Up Email 2:  Your second follow-up email can be more direct in referencing back to your past emails. Make sure it includes a clear CTA, such as scheduling a call or a demo. Let their past interactions with your outreach – if there were any – guide you in tailoring that next action. 
  • Final Email: Your closing email is your final attempt to engage with your prospect. Add a sense of urgency without adding pressure. Let them know that this is your last attempt, and if now isn’t the right time for them to move forward, they can still reach back out when the time is right.

Your touchpoints can be more or less frequent depending on the response you receive from prospects. They can even differ from the examples above based on your sales process and product. 

Typically, these key touchpoints are where a prospect makes a major decision. For example, offering a demo can go two ways:

• • Positive Action: The prospect agrees to try the demo, allowing you to provide them with an experience that can drive your proposal. 
  • No Action: The prospect rejects or ignores the demo, requiring more effort for you to drive their interest.

Test out your email sequencing to find what works best for you. Use your open rates and conversions as indicators for what’s working and what’s not, and adjust from there. Find a healthy balance to avoid sending too many emails that frustrate prospects and not sending enough to keep their interest and attention.

Related Content: Modernizing B2B Prospecting: Tools and Techniques for Effective Outreach

Step 4: Create a Multi-Touchpoint/Channel Sequence

When it comes to sales sequence best practices, a good way to avoid annoying your prospects is with a multi-touchpoint sequence. This approach allows you to maintain contact and keep your customers engaged by contacting them through the right channels at the right time. 

While you’re strategically using phone calls, emails, social media, and other platforms to initiate touchpoints, each one should build on the other.

• • Small and Steady – Start small with a multi-channel sequence. Sending an email or reaching them with a social media ad is a good starting point. When you know they’ve seen it, you can follow up with a phone call and if they don’t answer, leave a voicemail. Once you’re able to open up that line of communication with them, you can initiate a new touchpoint like an engaging video message. 
  • Line-Up Touchpoints With Key Dates – Try to line your touchpoint sequencing up with key dates or deadlines specific to the industry you’re selling to. For example, if you’re selling vehicle insurance, adjust your multi-channel prospecting sequence to tax deadlines and insurance renewal dates.
  • Determine the Best Channels – The purpose of a multi-channel sequence is to reach your customers where they are. Once you know where they are, you can strategize which touchpoint to use and when. A good way to tailor your approach is by what is most likely to get a timely response and allow you to best deliver the information. For example, a direct call often gets a quicker response, making it a great channel for urgent matters. However, text messages have higher response rates. Another channel to consider is email. It allows you to share more information in a single message, but social media may be more effective in reaching a specific prospect.
  • Utilize a Hierarchy – For more complex and high-ticket sales, you’ll need to set your touchpoints to engage with multiple decision-makers at different levels within the organization.  For example, contact the CEO through email, the senior manager through a direct call, the CFO through LinkedIn, etc.

Related Content: Outbound Tips to Hit Your Sales Prospecting Goals

Step 5: Personalize Your Messages

Personalization is a nonnegotiable in modern sales, making it a critical component of any sales sequence. Dozens of other reps may be pitching similar solutions, and how you personalize your messages is how you stand out. From personalized video messages to carefully crafted emails, personalizing your outreach can create more meaningful connections. 

When you’re following sales sequence best practices, personalization can take shape in a few different ways. Even if they aren’t immediately interested in what you’re offering, personalizing your messages can motivate them to listen to you.

Here are some tips on personalizing your messaging without sounding too robotic. 

• • Address them by name – This can seem basic, but it is often overlooked. Remember, overuse can start to feel awkward, so keep it conversational.
  • Apply insights into their interests and personality – Research your prospect’s position, interests, and recent accomplishments through news posts, blogs, and social media. Apply any relevant insight and information to your messaging to make a first impression that shows you put in time and effort.
  • Speak to their pain points – Your research should also include your prospect’s industry and its challenges. Point them toward your knowledge base and case studies, helping them while introducing your website. This can help you start building trust sooner.
  • Build a rapport – Try to avoid a hard sell too soon into your conversation. Try to chat with your prospect in real time if you aren’t having a conversation over the phone. Engage with them and speak more about the details of their business needs before introducing your product or service.

Step 6: Test, Measure, and Optimize

Once you’ve created your sales sequence, remember the work is not done. Like with any new strategy, you have to continuously test and optimize to find what works best for you. From your email sequencing to your touchpoint channels, everything can be tested and fine-tuned. It starts with setting a baseline and tracking the right data. From there, you can use that information to make data-based decisions on the optimizations you should be making. 

There are a few best practices you can follow when testing, measuring, and optimizing your sales sequence. 

• • Set a Baseline: Before you make changes, establish a baseline by measuring the sale cycle length, average new deal size, individual quota attainment, and average annual on-target earnings. This will give you something to compare your data against once you begin to make changes to see if any improvement is made to your results.
  • Track Your Data: Keep an eye on the data relevant to the changes you make. This can be anything from email open rates and engagement rates to your conversion rates. Tracking the data is the only way to truly measure the effectiveness of your changes.
  • Measure your Lifecycle Stages: Make sure to analyze the time it takes to move your prospects through each stage of your funnel. This will show you how well your sequence is helping your prospects progress and identify any areas in need of improvement.
  • Make Your Optimizations: Once you have all your data and can measure it against your baseline, you’ll have a clear picture of the optimizations that are needed. You must adopt a continuous improvement process with consistent optimization to ensure your sales sequence converts and doesn’t annoy your prospects. 

Testing and measuring your sequence will help you determine what steps need adjustments for better results. For example, maybe you’re spending too much time finding potential prospects, prompting you to optimize that process and reduce the time. 

Related Content: Never Stop Optimizing Your Sales Process with Technology & AI (7 Steps)

Step 7: Implement Automation and AI

Once you’ve optimized your sales sequence, implementing automation is the final step to making sure your efforts continue to be effective and efficient. Automation helps to ensure that your team is saving time on the more minor, tedious, and repetitive tasks. Their focus can instead be on more high-level tasks and higher-value activities, including closing deals with your prospects. 

Automation is one of the newer additions to sales sequence best practices, but the statistics prove its effectiveness across the board. According to a poll taken by Gartner, as 2023 came to a close, 55% of organizations were piloting or were already using GenAI in their operations. This widespread adoption has only grown across all industries as more businesses see how, when used effectively, it can increase their efficiency.

Now, in 2024, over 60% of business owners surveyed by Forbes say they believe that AI will improve customer relationships. That same percentage says that they expect AI to increase their productivity by streamlining their processes. 

When used correctly to create a successful sales sequence, automation with AI can offer a variety of improved productivity and efficiency benefits. 

• • Faster customer profiling: Reduce the time it takes to develop ideal customer profiles.
  • Streamlined sales mapping: Automatically design your sales process map based on your entries. 
  • Accurate touchpoint identification: Identify touchpoints based on prior sales sequence data.
  • Effective multi-channel sequences: Help identify the effectiveness of various channels for multi-touchpoint sequences while automating entered data based on your parameters.
  • Personalization at Scale: Allows you to personalize several messages simultaneously. For example, you can use the same personalized message for each email but have your automation tool change the names based on the prospect.
  • Up-to-date Reporting: Quickly develop reports that detail the differences in the performance of your sales sequences.

Start Seeing Better Results With A Sales Sequence That Doesn’t Annoy Prospects

A sales sequence that converts your prospects into closed deals without annoying them has to be well throughout with a systematic approach. These sales sequence best practices will help guide you as you map out the interactions to progress your prospects through the buyer journey. From building out your ideal customer profile to implementing automation, these seven steps will help keep your sales sequence well-timed, relevant, and personalized.

To recap, effective sales sequences rely on a solid foundation of customized customer profiles. These can be used to create a better sales process map and will follow you through each step. You can then identify your key touchpoints across a variety of channels and build a multi-touchpoint sequence based on that map and customer profile. 

Once you have your multichannel/touchpoint sequence, you can determine how you will personalize your messages at each touchpoint. Test, test, TEST your sequence, tracking the data as you go and optimizing it by comparing your sales sequence results. As a final step, automate as much of the sales sequence as possible to eliminate any redundancies. 

Now’s the time to start adapting your sales sequences to fit your prospects’ needs and preferences and building out your interactions based on what they’d want to see. The flow of your sales sequence could be the difference between a closed deal and a lost sale. Take the steps to optimize and start improving your sales effectiveness and conversion rates by focusing on what really matters – building relationships and closing deals.